Opinion: Why STEM is not enough (and we still need the humanities)

By staff and wire services reports

March 5th, 2012

Countering the recent trend among educational reformers who insist that America needs to concentrate on practical subjects or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), actor John Lithgow recently protested that no STEM can reproduce and sustain itself without a bloom, say Cathy N. Davidson, Paula Barker Duffy, and Martha Wagner Weinberg, who are all council members of the National Council on the Humanities, for the Washington Post. He made his remarks at the celebration of this year’s recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. Without beauty, creativity, and the deep, sustaining truths of history, philosophy, and literature, he insisted, STEM learning is joyless. Science and technology are meaningful when interwoven with all of the other modes of learning. A STEM, without its bloom, quickly withers in the forest of everyday life…